Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

These lines come from Thomas Nashe’s lyric commonly known as “A Litany in Time of Plague,” written for (and printed in) his play *Summer’s Last Will and Testament* (performed in the early 1590s; printed 1600). The song is voiced in the midst of a plague-stricken atmosphere that was familiar to Elizabethan London, where periodic outbreaks repeatedly closed theatres and disrupted civic life. Nashe, a satirist and pamphleteer as well as a dramatist, uses the litany form—echoing communal prayer and church responses—to frame private fear as a public, collective crisis. The refrain “Lord, have mercy on us!” recalls the penitential language associated with plague-time devotion and mortality.

The stanza compresses a memento mori into a few stark images: “brightness” (life, beauty, worldly splendor) falls away; even “Queens” die; even Helen—mythic emblem of beauty—ends with her eyes closed by dust. By moving from the general (“brightness”) to the socially exalted (“Queens”) to the legendary (“Helen”), Nashe insists that death levels all ranks and all ideals. The blunt admission “I am sick, I must die” breaks any rhetorical distance, turning exempla into immediate personal reckoning. The repeated plea “Lord, have mercy on us!” fuses terror with ritual, suggesting that in epidemic time the only stable response is communal supplication and spiritual humility before an inescapable end.